Monday, February 17, 2014

in
which our narrator considers the curiously broad appeal of John Dewey

The Secret Life of Teaching, #5

By Horace Dewey -- no (biological) relation

I write five words on the whiteboard five
times, each time underlining a different word:

All men are created equal.

All men
are created equal.

All men are
created equal.

All men are created
equal.

All men are created equal.

“So,
kids, are any of these statements
true?” I ask, turning around to face the class. “I mean, what
a crock of bull, right? How could Jefferson—himself a slave owner—possibly be
serious?"A few wry smiles. Some of them have apparently asked themselves
this question before.

Ilovethat line!" Vanessa Thompson, ever the contrarian in her
vintage Sex Pistols t-shirt. But she’s been too busy chatting with Janey Orlov
to be much of a presence today.“Doesn’t
matter whether they believe it," says Eduardo Salinas. "It’s
propaganda.”

I try to mask my surprise. This is the first time I’ve heard from
Eduardo all year. I want to kindle the flame without smothering him.“You think they’re lying?”“Dunno,”
he replies. “Maybe.”

“You called this ‘propaganda.’ What do you mean by that?”“I
mean they’re trying to persuade people.”

“Can propaganda be true?”“I guess.”

“Do you think they were trying to persuade themselves?”

Eduardo shrugs. I
can’t tell if he’s expressing skepticism or a desire to be let off the hook.

“I think they did believe it,” Zoe Leoni says without raising her
hand. “I mean, you kind ofhaveto believe it if you’re going to stick your neck out like
that."

“You say 'they. Do
'they' all think the same way?”

“No, probably not. But I don’t think they really have any choice. They’re desperate,
right? Didn’t you say yesterday that there’s like this big invasion the British
are planning?”

“Right. They’ve already landed on Long Island. They’re headed for
Manhattan even as the Declaration of Independence is being written.”

“So of course they’re going to talk about life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So it sounds like they’re the good guys.”

“But
how do they think they can get away with it?”“It
was a bunch of rich white guys who wanted other people to help them,” Derek Simonson,
who sits next to Eduardo, blurts out with an edge of impatience in his voice.Wonder of wonders: two silent types in one day.

“I think you’re absolutely right,” I say, more eager to encourage
him than to pursue the angle of ideological difference between the
revolutionaries. “A big part of the Declaration was designed to attract foreign
support, especially the French. But here’s what I wonder, Derek: Is this really
the best language to use in order to do something like this? Let’s assume
you’re right: these guys are essentially a bunch of frauds, and that people
then could see through them then just like you are now. I'm reminded of the
famous writer Samuel Johnson’s response to the colonists: ‘How is it that we
hear the loudest yelps of liberty from the drivers of negroes?’ So how is a lot of talk of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
really going to convince anybody?”

Jiian Cheng raises his hand, and I acknowledge him. "I don’t
think they really have any choice. I mean, you gotta start somewhere.”

Laura Lynn wants to weigh in and I nod to her. “Jiian’s right.
It’s an important first step.”

“A step towards what?”

“Freedom. Independence. All that stuff.”

“Well, OK.” I point at the whiteboard. “But this says ‘all men are
created equal.’”

She hesitates. Then: “Yeah, that too.”

“So freedom and equality go together? How does this work—first we
get the freedom, then we do equality?”

She’s lost. “Yeah, kinda.”

I shift my gaze from Laura and make a puzzled expression to the
class generally.“I don’t get it,
kids. What does freedom have to do with equality? Are they the same thing?”

What I regard as a fruitful line of discussion is disrupted by
Wilhelmina (a.k.a. Willie) Sperry, who has already emerged as one of my
favorite kids, maybe of all time. I often see Willie walking the hallways,
hunched over a backpack that looks like it’s crushing her and bearing a grim
expression in marked contrast to the animated child who’s most fully alive in
the classroom. In other words, a girl after my own heart. Not pretty,
really—red-haired, flat-chested and a little scrawny, Willie’s warm personality
has always made her appealing, at least to adults and what seems to be a small
circle of friends. But will the boys see it? (Maybe it won’t matter; maybe she’s gay.) Willie, who has been silently following this conversation with her
usual intensity, chooses this moment to raise her hand. But I’m disappointed
that she seems to be taking us way off course.“They’re hypocrites,” she says. “The King simply has
to go after them. If they’re allowed to get away with this, it would set a bad
example. They have insulted him . . . .”I begin to lose track of what Willie is saying. For one thing, it
seems tangential: what does the King have to do with what we’ve been talking
about? For another, I realize I’m hungry. And yet I marvel at how fully
immersed she is in this discourse. Even Janey Orlov has noticed. Not
approvingly.

I cut her off. “I’m not sure we need to shed any tears for George
III, Willie. If there’s anyone in the world who can brush off some punk critics,
surely it’s him. But I tell you who I am worried about,” I say, pausing for
effect. “The King ofSpain.” I put my
hand on my chin, and narrow my eyes. "I mean, here’s a guy who’s going to
be losing sleep at night.""Who is the King of
Spain?" Willie asks, genuinely curious.I dunno," I reply, not changing my expression. "Carlos
the twenty-something. They were all called Carlos back then." The class
breaks into laughter.

"See, here’s the problem,” I say when it subsides. There’snothingold Carlos would like more than to stick it toBritain. He wants it so badly he can almost taste it. The problem is that
if he and his Bourbon cousin Louis XVI enter an American war againstBritainon the side of a group of rebels who have issued this
revolutionary manifesto, then his own subjects in places likeMexicoandPerumight actually begin to take some of the nonsense in that
manifesto seriously. And that would be a real mess.”

“So what does he do?" This from Vanessa, who’s back among us.
My, my: I am on a roll today.

“Well, ultimately, he takes the plunge—he joinsFranceand declares war onBritain. And his fears
prove justified, because even though he gets some real estate out the deal,
within a generation all hell breaks loose in Central and SouthAmerica. Eventually, theMexicosandPerusof the world declare their own independence. The King of France,
who tended not to worry as much, ends up literally losing his head in the name
of abstract ideals like freedom and equality—which, I’ll point out in passing,
we’re still lumping together as if they’re two sides of the same coin. We can’t
blame all of this on the Declaration of Independence, of course. But it
certainly didn’t help matters if you’re the King of Spain."“Which,”
I continue, after a pause, “is another way of saying that you’re right, Eduardo
and Derek. The Declaration of Independencewasa piece of propaganda by a
bunch of rich white guys who were desperate enough to say whatever they thought
might help them at that particular moment. The problem is that in so doing they
let a genie out of a bottle, because some people, despite much evidence to the
contrary, actually began to believe what the Declaration said—or, maybe more
accurately, theyactedas if they believed what the Declaration said. ‘Acted,’ in the
sense that they pretended, and ‘acted’ also in the sense that they ended up
doing things that they otherwise might not have done had there been no
Declaration of Independence. That genie ended up doing a whole lot of mischief
all over the world.”“Still does,” says Willie with a smile.

“You
think so?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” Willie is firm. So smart, so
innocent. Eduardo is packing up his books: my signal that my time is up. Derek
is looking, inscrutably, at Willie. Oh, dear girl.

“You think so too, Zoe? You think Willie
is right?”

She nods.

“Well, then, I guess we’ve figured this
all out. See you tomorrow.”

* * *

People of all temperaments and
ideological persuasions become teachers, but the nature of the job as it’s
currently constituted makes them instinctive progressives. I should add that
I’m using the term in multiple senses, some of which I am avowedly skeptical.
But their valences are powerful and should be recognized, even if they’re not
dominant in the U.S. education system in particular or American society
generally.

In its most specific educational
formulation, the word “progressive” refers to a pedagogical philosophy that
took root in the late nineteenth century and has in various iterations
persisted to this day. Its patron saint is John Dewey. Central to Dewey’s
vision was an emphasis on process (discussion) over product (test scores);
subjective experience over objective truth; learning by doing rather than
having information delivered. As a movement, progressive education in this
country probably peaked in the 1930s, and has largely persisted as an
alternative educational subculture in the decades since.

That said, important elements of the
progressive ethos have long been absorbed as common sense even in schools that
consider themselves traditional. Such schools may emphasize traditional values,
basic skills, and mastery of content (and relentless testing). But they will
hardly disparage—indeed, they will likely explicitly uphold—critical thinking,
diversity of thought and experience, and pragmatic problem solving, all of
which are hallmarks of progressive education. Virtually no educators will
assert the primacy or necessity of lecturing as the best or only means of
delivering instruction, even when teacher-centered information delivery is the
primary approach. Ironically, one of the major problems for the contemporary
progressive education movement as a
movement is that many of its core ideas are now taken for granted, even when
they conflict with others. So it is that parents and educators insist on growth
and rigor, or diversity and continuity, whether or not they’re
simultaneously achievable.

The second way teachers tend to be
progressive is more generally political. In school systems of all sizes, where
different constituencies jockey for maximum room to maneuver, teachers are the
inheritors of the Progressive tradition—note the capital “P” to distinguish
indicate the movement in electoral politics that spanned roughly from 1900 to
1920. It’s important to note, however, that there was a curious bifurcation in
the Progressive movement that it never entirely resolved. On of the one hand,
early Progressives were locally based, experimental, and highly empirical in
their approach to social reform (not just in schools, but also business
regulation, municipal services, and electoral reform, among other initiatives).
They were very much bottom-up. On the other hand, Progressives were also—and
this became increasingly apparent as the movement gained momentum in the second
decade of the twentieth century, when it dominated that nation’s political life
in both major parties—great centralizers of power, as long as it was
concentrated in the hands of independent experts who acted in the name of the
common good. If the settlement house worker Jane Addams personified the first
strand of Progressivism, Theodore Roosevelt was the epitome of the second. By
the time of Roosevelt’s successor, Woodrow Wilson, however, there were growing
questions about whether experts really could be trusted to act on the common
good—Wilson, who held a Ph.D. in political science, was notoriously high-handed
in his foreign policy, for example—and whether they really knew as much as they
thought they did. Though Progressives and their contemporary heirs have always
thought of themselves of champions of The People, their skeptics have always
regarded them, not without reason, as elitists insufferably blind to their own
arrogance.

Whether or not they identify as latter
day inheritors of the old Progressive tradition, most teachers in their
day-to-day lives embrace the Progressivism of the localized Jane Addams
variety. In contrast to administrators or politicians who want to impose their
ideas for reform from the top down, they see themselves working with the facts
on the ground: particular children responding to specific circumstances that
may or may not correspond to a reform template. To at least some extent, this
is a matter of self-interest: workers in many occupations tend to insist on the
necessity of discretion in performing their jobs well. But teachers aren’t the
only ones who make this case for their roles in the classroom; a long tradition
of reformers, some of them in positions of administrative authority, have
embraced the principle of teacher autonomy, even if this has always been a
minority view in policymaking circles.

The third and most decisive way in which
teachers tend to be progressive is what might be termed temperamental. In a
literal sense, to be a progressive is to believe in progress, and anyone who’s
in the business of educating children that does not believe in progress is
probably in the wrong line of work. In this realm, too, the word has multiple
meanings.

The most fundamental, of course, is at
the level of the individual child. Teachers must act as if—and at least try to
believe that—every student is capable of improving. This uniform principle gets
affirmed in highly variable ways. A good teacher will assess where a student is
and identify an attainable goal, and in a good teacher’s assessment of student
work, the distance that student has traveled will matter at least as much as
the objective quality of the work. The essence of fairness in this context
means taking differences into account, of honoring the struggle more than the
effortlessly achieved excellence.This is an admittedly tricky matter, inherently subjective in nature.
But it’s a standard worth pursuing. The fact of the matter is that virtually
all students do make progress,
variously understood, over the course of their academic careers. The school or
instructional climate will never entirely account for it, though such factors
(among them a child’s teacher) really can matter.

This progressive principle also applies
to the craft of teaching itself. As anyone who’s done it for any length of time
will agree, you get better at as you go along. Improvement can take the form of
formal professional development, acquiring more knowledge from casual reading,
or simply mastering a curriculum by repeatedly teaching it. There is certainly
something to be said for the vitality of a new teacher, whose receptiveness to
experience and willingness to shoulder often onerous demands (like teaching
unfamiliar material) should not be underestimated as a source of institutional
vitality. And there’s no question that that dead wood—which is to say teachers
who have given up trying to grow—is a problem at virtually every school. But
the seasoned veteran teacher is an asset any successful school will have in
abundance.

The most profound way in which teachers
are temperamentally progressive is generational: they believe in the future, a
faith grounded in their engagement with the children who will take their place
as adults. Strictly speaking, a desire and ability to work with young people
doesn’t necessarily mean you think the future will be better than the past. (I don’t,
for reasons I’ll explain shortly.) But unless you’re animated by some sense of hope about tomorrow,
teaching becomes an exercise in grim fatalism, no doubt a contributing factor
in dead wood syndrome.

Perhaps more than teachers elsewhere,
American teachers have a particular attachment to seeing their work as part of
a larger drama in the progress of U.S. society. For much of the nineteenth
century, the dominant strain of historical interpretation in Great Britain and
the United States was the so-called Whig school, which emphasized the degree to
which history was a story of progress—moral no less than scientific—embodied in
the White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant politicians who emphasized the importance
of liberty (notably the liberty of American colonists in their revolutionary
struggle for independence, whose supporters in England were known as
Whigs).The Whig interpretation of
history fell out of favor around the time of the First World War—events in the
first half of the twentieth century discredited confident assumptions of
progress—and are regarded as racist today. But the notion that American life
has been one of gradual improvement remains an article of faith that continues
to animate everyday life inside as well as outside of classrooms.

You can see this progressive sensibility
in just about any U.S. history textbook. If the Whig school cast its notion of
progress in terms of white supremacy, these books instead depict a slow,
irregular, but unmistakable march toward pluralistic egalitarianism. Particularly
in the early going, these books have a demographic emphasis. We’re introduced
to groups of people of African, European, and Native American origin, and the
divisions and interplay between them.However subjugated they are at the hands of imperial Europeans, those
shut out of power manage to maintain their dignity and their hope in the face
of considerable adversity. Though they experience tragedy, even catastrophe,
they manage collectively to live another day. They’ll have their postcolonial moment,
just like the United States has. History is destiny—of a hopeful kind. It’s
what we think students need.

But—and this was the point of that
opening anecdote—this progressive version of U.S. history is not something I tell them. This is something they
tell me. It’s a logic they’ve
absorbed into their bones long before they reach me. I’ve done this “all men
are created equal” exercise a bunch of times, and it always goes pretty much
the same way. I’ll usually get a student or two who says it really is nonsense.
But inevitably one or two students will come forward and say that such a
judgment is too harsh. I press them to explain, they may or may not flail in
their attempt to do so, and a classmate or two (or three) will jump in. The
gist of their riposte will be, in effect, that the Declaration of Independence
was a kind of first draft of progressive history. First the white men were
created equal. Then we remembered the ladies. Then the slaves got freed. And so
on through gay marriage. That’s our history. It may short on facts. But it’s
long on vision—which, let’s face it, is the most you can really hope for in a
history course.

My problem is I’m not sure I really believe it. Yes: it is
possible, desirable—right—to think of events like the ending of slavery,
suffrage for women, the egalitarian achievements of the Progressive era, the
New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement(s) as constituting an upward moral as
well as material trajectory in American history. But if we stipulate that—and
we put aside social hydraulics that seem to suggest gains for some people
always seems to mean losses for others (e.g. the decline of economic equality
that has accompanied racial equality in the last four decades)—progress is not
a permanent state. Republics and empires come and go: that seems to be the iron law of history. The arc of history is
long, but it is an arc: what goes up
must come down.

Unfortunately, this is not something I’m
experiencing as an abstract proposition. Virtually every sentient American in
the early 21st century is uncomfortably aware of a discourse of
decline in our national life, particularly in the economic and political realm.
Though (shockingly for anyone over 30), events like 9/11, the Iraq War and the
financial crisis of 2008 are distant events for today’s students, all have
grown up in homes where recent history casts long shadows. For some students,
they loom large in their overall perception of American history; for others
they don’t, either because they haven’t fully absorbed their impact or because
they imagine them as developments that are not really part of the historical
record. Mostly, I think, reconciling recent events with their progressive
vision of history is a matter of living with cognitive dissonance in the form
of cultural lag that’s quite common to people in all times and places.

I don’t directly challenge the historical
progressivism of my students, other than to note at some point in the school
year that visions of history come in many shapes: circles, spirals, straight
lines, and inclines (I usually draw them for the visual learners).I don’t particularly want to evangelize
my fatalism, partially because my instinctive skepticism makes me question my
own certitude—events rarely happen in the way or at the pace we predict. But
even if I did have certainty, I wouldn’t push it on them, because I can’t see
how it would do them any good. I don’t want to puncture their confidence.
Instead, I hope to sharpen their understanding—here’s where the facts and
information come in, because they can help a good student get a particular
version of the story straight—and send them on their way. In this regard, I
really am a progressive educator in
that first pedagogical way I talked about, the heir of a movement that
emphasizes the plasticity of knowledge and the need for children to construct
their own working models about the way the world works, but to do so in a
social context where they are interacting with others.

And yet—and this is something I struggled
with as a form of cognitive dissonance in my own life—I am not a progressive in
the broadest, most historical, sense of the term. There are days when I feel
like I’m leading lambs to the slaughter, when I am fostering habits of thoughts
and behavior that will be singularly unhelpful in a coming world that will not
be like the one in which we are living. Sometimes I imagine that future world
as one of chaos; other times it’s one of stifling autocratic order. Either way,
I imagine former students bitterly recalling the irrelevance, or worse, of what
they learned in school.

So what keeps me going? My salvation is
my ignorance: I don’t know, I can’t
know, what will happen in the future. Call me an existentialist progressive: I
labor in the faith—in the end, that’s all it is—that something I do, something
I say, something I ask my students to read, will have some utility in their
later lives. Some sliver that will be transubstantiated into an act of
leadership—or, more simply, some act of decency—that will bring good into the
lives of that student and the broader community in which that student lives.
That’s not much to count on, I know. But sometimes it’s the counting that’s the
problem.

Monday, February 10, 2014

The following piece has been published on the home page of the HNN website.

The
phone on my desk is ringing when I arrive in my office at 8:17 a.m. on the
Thursday morning in the week before winter break, though with the temperature
stuck in the thirties, Spring feels like an eternity away. I pick up the
receiver—how much longer is there going to be a phone on my desk?—while
simultaneously trying to slip out of my coat. I’m tempted not to answer it.

"Hello?"

"Mr.
Dewey?"

"Speaking."

"I'm
so glad to reached you.This
is Ruth, Jason's mom? We met at the basketball game a couple weeks ago."

"Yes
of course. How are you?" In my mind I see nothing, no name, no face.But Jason—Jason
Thompson—will be enough to work with. I drape my coat over my desk chair, pull
my laptop out of my briefcase, and power it up.

"Well,
I've been better,” she’s saying. “I'm calling about the History Day project. As
you know, Jason's working with Tom Schlacter."

"Yes.”
I sort of do know that.I’ve
got a hard copy of the master list somewhere in my inbox. I begin to rustle
through it.

"A
thoroughly depressing subject, if you ask me."Now I remember: They're
doing the decision to drop the atomic bomb.Originally, they wanted to do
World War II.I
told them the subject was too broad.They've narrowed it down to the bomb, and
are working on a PowerPoint (the first refuge of scoundrels).The first draft I saw
was not too promising.Big
slabs of text, relatively weak in conceptual organization. Technical glitches.Normally, one or both of
them will be working with Joey Rizzo.But Joey has grand plans for a tabletop
reenactment of Pickett's Charge that he says he's been working on since July
with Roy Shimkin. Ominously, I’ve seen nothing new on Jason and Tom's project
since they handed in their notably sketchy first draft last week, only an email
with a string of questions that could have been answered if they’d actually
studied the assignment’s parameters.

Then
I realize that I've not been paying close attention to Ruth, who has been
explaining the series of obstacles Jason and Tom have encountered. "It
doesn't help matters any that Tom lives so far downtown.He never wants to come to
our place. Did you know that they spentall
nightworking
on this Saturday?"

Given
the taciturnity of both of these boys, I'm tempted to ask how I would know
that, but bite my tongue. I also imagine an empty pizza box, a Madden NFL game
on a laptop, and vintage Ludacris blaring from a set of speakers.Still, I feel a twinge
of unease. Truth is, the History Day Project has long been a sore point among
some administrators and colleagues, who think it asks too much of the kids at a
difficult time of year. We have revisited the subject from time to time as a
department, and concluded that the pluses outweigh the minuses.For grading purposes we
like to have a substantial grade-wide assessment at the end of the quarter, and
see bona fide value in a group undertaking in which students get to choose
their topic and work on it in a planned sequence of stages.And some of the final
results are truly extraordinary.Alas, that's not going to be the case here.

"I'm
sorry to hear that,” I say soothingly about the all-nighter.“I know that this is a
difficult undertaking.That's
why I always emphasize at the start of the project that students need to think
carefully about with whom they're going to work and to emphasize that the
quality of their collaboration is an important dimension of what this is all
about.I
also emphasize that they stand or fall together, and that if one kid coasts and
another kid does all the work, that itself can be a valuable lesson."

"Well,
I'm not sure I agree with you about that,” she says. “Don't get me wrong— I'm
not saying that Jason has handled this perfectly. He can be lazy.But I knew as soon as I
heard that he was can be working with Tom were going to be problems. Tom is a
nice kid, but I don’t think he’s capable of pulling his weight, intellectually
or otherwise.”

Not
a kind assessment, but not an inaccurate one, either. I click on my browser, go
to my bookmarks, and choose the weather page. I see something about an
approaching storm.

"What
I don't understand," she continues, "is the timing of this project. Why
does it have to be just before the break?We're leaving for St. Bart's tomorrow
morning.We’ve
planned this trip for months, and I'm pulling the kids out of school tomorrow
to get an early start.”

I
click on the WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY link. Snow to begin late this afternoon;
six to ten inches by morning. Fine by me: I’m not going anywhere.

"Well,”
I respond, “the deadline for this project is something my department
periodically reviews. But
we've learned from experience that it makes more sense to
have the project due before the break so that really we clear the decks for
kids to have a real vacation. Nobody likes to have a big assignment hanging
over their heads going into a stretch of time off."Actually, I have
traditionally had this assignment due a weekbeforethe break, but watching
my own son scramble to complete it (a documentary about strategic bombing --
the boys always seem to go for war) has led me to conclude that a little more
time really does make a difference.He kept me out of the loop on that one, I’m
happy to say.His
partner’s dad was a documentary filmmaker, so that's where they got most of
their help.

Ruth
is pressing the point: "I've got to tell you, an assignment like this
really wreaks havoc on family life."

"Again,
I'm sorry to hear that.Is
there something you'd like me to do? Would you like me to talk with the boys?”

“That
would be good," she says."But
what would really help is giving them more time.I don't think these two really
understood what they’ve gotten themselves into. The geographic factor has
really proven to be a major complication, and coming up with good times to
collaborate has been a major, major problem. At my urging, they made plans to
meet after school today—Tom is going to skip practice and come over—and my hope
is that they’ll forge a game plan to finish it. I think Jason will have lots of
down time between connecting flights and will be able to work while we’re on
the plane. They can communicate by email or instant messaging or whatever. Do
you think you could give them another day or two?"

I
can't resist a smile.Normally,
I'd be in a position I really hate: having to say no.To accede to this
request would not only precipitate an avalanche of similar ones—the word would
be on the street almost immediately—but get me into trouble with my colleagues,
as we've all sworn a blood oath to hold the line in the face of these
pressures. I realize I'm taking a chance here, but if my bluff gets called, I
can say I was certain, however mistakenly, that there was going to be a snow
day, rendering the deadline moot.

"Well,
I don't like to do this, but understand extenuating factors in this particular
situation.So
I'll allow Jason and Tom a little more time to finish this up.As long as I have it we
get back from break, there should be no harm done."

"The
best part of this," she tells me, adopting a confiding, even
conspiratorial, tone, "is that Jason will be spending the second week of
the break with his father.For
once in his life, the man will actually have to pay attention to his son's
needs.Can't
wait to seethat.”

"Glad
to be of service," I say with a chuckle.And though I don't know why, I
mean it.Though
she's given me little reason to think so, I suspect her grievance with her ex,
whoever he is, may well be legitimate."Have a good trip, Ruth."

“Thank
you, Mr. Dewey.”

“Please call me Horace.” But she’s
already hung up.

Turned
out to be more like a foot. But they got out in time. Jason came back with an
enviable tan.

* * *

There are multiple frictions in the
triangular relationship between parent, teacher, and student, ranging from
grades to school budgets. But on a day-to-day basis, the most pervasive, if
evanescent, is homework.It’s a
subject on which each party feels ambivalence. Students typically say they hate
homework, but it’s often the source of their most substantial achievements.
Teachers feel they need homework to make class time more productive, but
assigning it usually means more grading. Parents want to feel their children
are learning, but worry about the demands on their time and the way homework
can sometimes interfere with extra-curricular and/or family activities. (Having
been involuntarily been drawn into my own children’s projects, sometimes as a
matter of the specific mandate of teachers, I can sympathize with this
exasperation.)

Of these three constituencies, it’s
teachers who are the most stalwart champions of homework. Mastery of anything
is always to some degree a matter of a willingness to invest—and a willingness
to waste—time in the pursuit of long-term gain. This is a truth that students
experience in realms ranging from sports to computer games. Not all students
are eager to make such an investment in Spanish or chemistry, but they
certainly can understand why their parents and teachers want that for them.

Which
is not to say that homework is always assigned thoughtfully or usefully by
teachers. Inexperienced or lazy ones will sometimes use homework as a crutch to
compensate for failures to use class time efficiently. Or they will assign
homework that has no clear relationship to the material being covered in class.
Or assign it without assessing it in a timely way—or at all, an omission that
breeds resentment and fosters corrosive corner-cutting by students.

Even
if one assumes that every teacher is thoughtful about the way homework is
deployed, the fact that any middle- or high school student will be taking up to
a half-dozen subjects at a time creates significant stress in even the
best-organized student’s life. It’s not unusual in some school districts for
students to routinely have over three hours of homework a night, a particularly
daunting prospect for a kid in a play or on a team who returns from school on a
late bus, has dinner, and gets to work circa 7:30 p.m., twelve or more hours
after the day has begun. While schools often have circuit breakers of various
kinds in place for this kind of problem (no homework over weekends or holiday
breaks, make-up provisions for students saddled with multiple assessments on
the same day, et. al.), they’re such
complicated organisms with so many moving parts that it’s virtually impossible
to craft an even work flow for any given kid. Even if this was possible from an academic standpoint, the discretionary choices
students make—clubs, theater, sports—and their varying ability to juggle such
balls, complicate any attempt to create a truly level playing field. Under the
circumstances, teachers can not only plausibly say they can’t know what else their students are doing, but also that they shouldn’t allow such knowledge to become
a consideration, lest their particular enterprise be crippled altogether.

It’s
for reasons like these that education reformers like Alfie Kohn argue for the
elimination of homework entirely. Such arguments get additional support when
one considers how little a role homework plays in leading educational powers
like Finland. And how much of role it
plays in others like South Korea, where saddling students with extra work has
become an arms race of sorts generating so much misery and alarm that the
government has resorted to police raids on tutoring classes that run beyond the
state-mandated curfew of 10 p.m.

Perhaps
predictably, I will state that I’m a homework partisan. I try to be intelligent
and efficient about it. Even more than work undertaken during class time,
students should have a clear understanding about how what they’re being asked
to do fits into a larger curricular schema or prepares them for an upcoming
assessment. Homework should be relatively modest in scope—the rule at my school
is an average of 45 minutes a night—and ideally give students some leeway in
the timing as to when they complete it, as in an assignment given on Monday but
not actually due until later in the week.

There
are two core tasks that homework is good for—that homework is uniquely good for. Both are alike in
that they demand a measure of concentration and reflection difficult to come by
during the school day. The process of education is inherently social; while
home schooling has its partisans and may be necessary for any number of
reasons, children learn best in school because interacting with peers on
multiple levels is central to learning (including the acquisition of self-knowledge).
And yet—in part for that very reason—an educational process that does not build
in opportunities for solitude and absorbing lessons, implicit as well as
explicit ones, is incomplete. Students need time to make sense of things. This work of making sense can happen in the
hurly burly of class discussion or in scribbling down notes while a teacher
talks, but processing and integrating information is typically work that gets
completed off-site.

The
first important homework task is reading. Adults typically laud it, for
themselves and children—“readers are leaders,” a beloved uncle of mine, a
construction worker who as far as I can tell was indifferently educated at
best, used to say—but few of us really have much stamina for it. Reading
requires a sense of focus that’s difficult to attain, because there’s so little
time in the day, or because of our physiological limitations, or both. I think
of reading as really quite akin to physical exercise: the more you do it, the
better you get at it, and the faster your mind works. Reading may well be less
important for the actual content you encounter than the habits of mind it
inculcates—attentiveness, imagination, a capacity for abstraction. In the end,
reading is the sin qua non of learning: everything else is a short-cut, a
compensation, a substitution (like a fad diet in lieu of exercise). To use a
cooking metaphor: reading is homemade; getting it in lecture form is
store-bought. Sure, reading takes longer. But it’s just plain better.

Precisely
because reading is so difficult, teachers should assign it with care—something
which, alas, is difficult when one is subject to district-wide mandates.
Textbooks are like baby food in that they’re age-appropriate, relatively
substantial, and segmented into measured servings. But that doesn’t mean
they’re tasty. Far better are selections chosen by a well-read teacher with a
sharp eye for the relevant newspaper article, blog post, short story or poem.
As in so many other ways, less is more. In part that’s because the ability for
students and teacher to read together, to close-read
sentences and passages, is an excellent use of class time after students come
to class having already had a first coat of exposure to a piece of text.
Reading intensively, which is to say
reading things more than once, is among the most important wellsprings of
learning.

Reading
is so crucial because it’s foundational for success in an even more demanding
intellectual task that’s also best undertaken as homework: writing. Writing is
among the most complex neurological tasks the human brain performs, and it’s
hard work. Paradoxically, good writing seems effortless. Which is one of the
reasons students find it so daunting: it seems
like it should be easy, and when it isn’t they assume they’re bad at it, which
makes them even less willing to undertake it. But knowing that it’s hard for
everyone will only get you so far: writing is like bench-pressing a lot of
weight—you have to work yourself up to it. That’s what school is for: creating
a space where such activities are promoted and sustained, precisely because
there’s really nowhere else it would happen on a mass scale.

But—really—the
single most important reason to ask students to write is that it’s something
that they must do alone. Only when they’re by themselves, grappling, seeking,
struggling to communicate with somebody else, are they fully engaged in the
task of learning. Actually, they can’t really begin to explain something to
someone else until they’ve explained it to themselves, which is what first
drafts are for. Writing is also a collaborative enterprise, in that peers and
parents can provide feedback, and in some cases teachers can sit beside
students and coach them through the process. But even when this happens, there
still needs to be a time and place where students follow through on their own:
the coach must step aside.

The
coaching analogy is a very rich one for understanding teaching generally, but
it has particular value in the context of homework. Coaches prescribe workouts,
some of which are executed on the field of play, but much of which take place
offsite. The coach can’t monitor any given athlete continuously; nor can a
coach be certain that a particular routine will pay off equally or at all for
every athlete. It’s a game of percentages which, should the student honor the
coach’s instructions, is likely to yield long-term gain. Beyond some general
parameters (like the length of a practice and care for the health of the
athletes), the coach doesn’t know or care what else the players may have to do,
and a coach’s personal regard for a player should not cloud the coach’s
judgment about who is or isn’t in shape. There are no guarantees. But the best
way to win games is to practice.

* * *

The
goals of the History Day project that Jason and Tom are working on are a bit
different than what I’ve been outlining here. My school participates in the
National History Day, a program that annually involves 50,000 students from 49
states who work within the parameters of an annually chosen theme like “Turning
Points in History,” “Revolution, Reaction and Reform,” or “Rights and
Responsibilities.” Students can work alone or collaborate in groups of up to
three people, and choose formats within a menu of options that include tabletop
exhibitions, documentaries, dramatic presentations and websites. My colleagues
and I believe that the work of formulating arguments may be easier for students
when working in media other than traditional essays, which is why this project
is a capstone assessment for the quarter (a grade-wide research essay is the
main undertaking for the end of the year).

We’re
pretty upfront with students at the time when we assign this project in January
that it’s as much about managing the enterprise as it is about the content. That
means planning ahead for deadlines that come up in stages: topic, bibliography,
first draft, final draft.We tell
them: choose your partners carefully, because you sink or swim together.
Someone who does all the work will get the same grade as a member of your team
that does none. (In fact, we keep an eye on this, and make a mental note the
balance the ledgers in some silent way.) “I'm not sure I agree
with you about that,” Ruth had said when I explained my colleagues’ thinking in
our phone conversation, and she might be right. But we try to get kids to
perform different kinds of intellectual tasks, and revealing her son’s
difficulty in performing this one is part of the point.

For
all our planning and justifications, however, we never entirely feel we’re in
control of the assignments we give. Loopholes and ambiguities inevitably
present themselves; so do unplanned exigencies like snowstorms. My delight in
conferring on Ruth and Jason Thompson an extension dissipates quickly as my
colleagues in the History Department realize the storm is creating a logistical
mess, and a flurry of emails swirl among us. If the History Day project was a
run-of-the-mill essay, we might simply expect students to email their work to
us, whether or not school was in session. But given the number of projects that
actually have to be brought in and set up (the kindly librarians have given us
some space), we can’t expect that. Since we need to be uniform, we decide the
project will have to be due the first day back after the break. The very thing
we were trying to prevent—having kids with homework over the holidays—has come
to pass. Jason and Tom’s project, long on images and short on interpretation,
gets a B. On the acknowledgments panel of their PowerPoint, Jason thanks his
Dad, “for help in proofreading, and for the pizza.” Motherhood, apparently, is
truly a thankless task.

In
the aftermath of the year’s assignment, we decide that maybe a post-break due
date isn’t such a bad idea after all. In fact, we agree, the thing to do is to
have draft workshops the first week back, and have the projects due the second
week. That will create a grading squeeze before the semester ends, but it seems
worth it. For teachers no less than students, there’s no substitute for
experience. We learn by doing—and redoing.

Late November: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A few years ago, I teamed up
with two colleagues in the English and Ethics departments to team-teach this
Humanities course built around the theme of freedom. The course is divided into
six units, each juxtaposing freedom with another concept that exists in some
tension with it. So, for example, we open the school year with freedom and
tolerance, in which we read The Scarlet
Letter and study literal and metaphorical witch-hunts (like McCarthyism,
allegorized in The Crucible, or the
AIDS crisis, as depicted in Angels in
America). Huck Finn is embedded
in the transition between freedom/independence (the American Revolution,
Transcendentalism, adolescent development) and freedom/slavery (Toni Morrison’s
A Mercy, Phillis Wheatley, the Civil
War). In every unit we juxtapose the literary and historical material with
philosophy (Aristotle’s notion of slavery) and modern-day analogies (is modern-day
sweatshop labor simply slavery by another name?).

It was a real challenge to get this
course off the ground, and it took a couple of years of tinkering to get it
right. Now it hums along, and there are times when I find it a little boring.
When you do the same book year after year, you tend to get lazy; I haven’t
actually re-read Huck in years. I’ve
got a well-annotated copy I review as we get underway for about a two-week
stretch of classes, and I’m probably one of the few people who uses SparkNotes
for its supposed purpose: as a means to review the book (as opposed to a
substitute for reading it). Actually, my main source of preparation for class,
adopted at the urging of my tech-savvy colleage, is the online forum in which
students are required to post passages they find interesting and to explain
why. I’ll pluck out something I think has possibilities for close reading, or
note if there’s a passage that seems to get multiple takers.

I’ve also got a few set pieces that I
know from experience will generate a good conversation. One, of course, is the
famous passage in Chapter 31, in which an anguished Huck, is torn between
returning lost (human) property to its legal owner versus helping that property
find his freedom. He finally decides on the latter: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he says, ripping up the
note he’d written disclosing the location of the escaped slave Jim.

So it is that when I walk in to the classroom for what will be my
fourth discussion of Huck Finn on a
chilly but brilliant autumnal day I’m a little rusty but ready to improvise.
I’ve got to pocket Chapter 31, because it will be awhile before we get there.
So instead I’ll ask the students to summarize the novel through the first eight
chapters, which is a relatively easy point of entry as well as a device to jog
my memory. So gang,” I ask, raising a steaming paper cup of coffee to my lips,
“who is Huckleberry Finn?”

I sip in silence. Damn. This is a
misfire: I intended a kid to say something like, “He’s a boy from Missouri
who’s running away from his father and traveling with an escaped slave.” But it
seems my query has been interpreted more interpretively and thus difficult to answer, as if I’m
expecting something like, “He’s an empathic pragmatist in a morally corrupt
social milieu.” I put my cup down on my desk, wait a beat, and say, “He’s a
very blank person who blanks. Go ahead in fill in those
blanks.”

Still nothing. And then Alba
Montanez—decent student though her last essay was all over the place—blurts
out, “He’s obsessed with death.”

I think: Blech.

I say: “Interesting, Alba. Can you
elaborate a bit?”

Kim Anders—volleyball team, got a 92 on
the last test, litigated another three points out of me—says, “Yes! I was thinking
the same thing!”

What wavelength
are these kids on? “OK,” I say. “But why?”

Kim continues her interruption of Alba.
“Well, his mother is dead, right? That’s like the first thing we’re told.”

“Yes, we’re told that. But where do you
get the idea of this death fixation?” I know I sound little impatient, but I
think it’s a fair question, and I think in any case that I can get away with
posing it, even with some irritation, to Kim.

But it’s Alba jumps back in. “It says
right here on page six that the widow read to him about Moses. ‘She let it out
that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn’t care about
him; because I don’t take no stock in dead people.’”

“Hmmm. So the fact that he’s talking
about a dead person—says he doesn’t care
about dead people—is evidence of an obsession.” I make this a statement, not a
question. I’m hoping I can gently jog her out of what I regard as a foolish
assertion.

Instead, Alba says “Exactly.” I’m about
to argue the point but stop myself. “What do the rest of you think? Do you
agree with Alba and Kim that Huck has a death fixation?

I scan the faces in the room. Steven
Gridley is looking out the window. Tommy Giddens is whispering to Zak Pacek. Tara
Millberg is staring at her laptop. Evelyn WuWong is looking at me expectantly.
She’s paying attention but clearly has no intention of jumping into the fray.

Tara, who has permission to
take notes with the laptop but in all likelihood has been shopping for shoes,
looks up. “He’s just so, what’s the word . . . you know when you’re just only
reacting to what other people do—”

There’s something incongruous
about Tara Millberg—lustrous hair, ruddy cheeks, fingernail polish that picks
up the accents on her wool sweater—talking about death. It seems so remote that
she can barely talk about it coherently. And yet she’s not entirely wrong. And,
sure as she sitting there, death, like that character in the Emily Dickinson
poem, will be coming by to claim her. For the first time, I’m curious about
what will happen in the meantime.

“I’m a little confused,” I say,
returning my gaze to Alba. “How can you be obsessed with death at the same
moment you’re saying you don’t put no stock in dead people? Isn’t that a
contradiction?”

Alba narrows her eyes, taking
the question in. Is she going to be able to parry it? If she doesn’t, maybe I
can steer this conversation back on course—or, maybe more accurately, out of
the gate. I’m thinking the opening of Chapter 4, in which Huck talks about his
schooling (he could “spell, and read, and write just a little, and say the multiplication
table up to six times seven is thirty-five”). Can’t go wrong talking about
education with high school kids.

But now it’s Sam Stevens—Dad
writes for the Times, apparently he’s
a good guitar player—who enters the fray. “What’s with the staging his death
thing?”

“Staging his death thing?”

“Yeah. When his dad starts
beating him. He makes it look like he’s been killed.”

“Right. That’s how he makes his
escape. It’s a means to an end. Doesn’t mean he’s obsessed with death, does
it?”

“Kinda weird, if you ask me.”

I guess I did ask. Maybe these kids are on to something.

“I think Huck is depressed.”
This from Dana Weiss. Figures. It’s not the first time I’ve heard therapy-speak
from her. I remember her once referring to Arthur Dimmesdale of The Scarlet Letter as having low
self-esteem. Tell me Mom isn’t a
psychotherapist.

“Depressed, huh?”

“Yeah. I think so. I actually
read ahead a little bit to the whole Grangerfords and Sherpherdsons clan war
thing. That whole part about Emmeline Grangerford. After she dies Huck seems
really upset. It’s interesting after the whole Moses thing Alba just read. It’s
like this is the first time he allows himself to really grieve. And then he
says something like ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’”

I’m a little stunned by this insight.
My memory of the book is sketchy, but I know what Dana is talking about.

“Thanks a lot for giving the
plot away!” Kim exclaims.

I’m about to try to explain to
Kim that it’s not that big a deal when suddenly the fire alarm goes off. Damn.
I remember the assistant principal telling me yesterday we’re behind on the
quota that the state mandates. “Oh!” Dana says, genuinely upset. Steven Gridley
looks like he’s just received a get-out-of-jail card. As per our protocol, we
file out of the room and out of the building silently.

Shivering on the sidewalk,
waiting for the all-clear, an essay question begins to take shape: Some observers of The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (wink, wink) say that
the Huck Finn we meet at the start of the story is suffering from depression,
and in particular an obsession with death. Do you agree? If not, why not? If
so, explain why—and where, if anywhere, you think that begins to change. In
what ways would you say his state of mind is shaped by his historical
circumstances? Be sure to use evidence from the novel to support your thesis.
Gonna have to think about the depression thing—how to define it. Then again,
let’s see if any of them do it. I’m always talking about defining your terms.
Maybe a few of them will.

“Two down, six to go,” my
colleague Eddie Vinateri says of the fire drills as we get the signal to head
back into the building. After a pause, he gestures toward my clutch of
returning students, a few of whom have, unaccountably, taken the book out with
them. “How’s Humanities going?”

About King's Survey

King's Survey is an imaginary high school history class taught by Abraham King, a.k.a. "Mr. K." Though the posts proceed in a loosely chronological fashion, you can drop in on the conversation any time. For more background on this series, see my other site, Conversing History. The opening chapter of "Kings Survey" is directly below.

“The Greatest Catholic Poet of Our Time . . . Is a Guy from the JerseyShore? Yup,” in The Best Catholic Writing 2007, edited by Jim Manney (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2007)

“I’s a Man Now: Gender and African-American Men,” in Divided Houses:Gender and the Civil War, edited by Nina Silber and Catherine Clinton (Oxford University Press, 1992).

THE COMPLETE MARIA CHRONICLES, 2009-2010

Most writing in the vast discourse about American education is analytic and/or prescriptive: It tells. Little of that writing is actually done by active classroom teachers. The Maria Chronicles, like the Felix Chronicles that preceded them (see directly below), takes a different approach: They show. These (very) short stories of moments in the life of the fictional Maria Bradstreet, who teaches U.S. history at Hudson High School, located somewhere in metropolitan New York, dramatize the issues, ironies, and realities of a life in schools. I hope you find them entertaining. And, just maybe, useful, whether you’re a teacher or not.–Jim Cullen